Sunny with a Chance of Vervet Monkeys: Journaling through the Kruger National Park

Some reflections, notes, lists created and map books used during our trip.

We entered the reserve through the northern-most gate, Pafuri, where the environment is sandveld, sand soils with diverse vegetation and known for the amount of baobab and fever trees. The northern half of the park is also known for its variety of birds and that decided where we would enter to ensure we saw as many bird species as possible.

The last time we had visited the Pafuri picnic spot I remember a male and female nyala (a species of buck) pair, just lazing around at the area, so at peace even with people nearby and I was not disappointed, again a pair was at the picnic spot, just as relaxed as before.

21/22 August - Shingwedzi Rest Camp

The environment is open savannah grassland with stunted mopane trees. (What makes the stunted - the giraffes as gardeners?)

We saw nine lions around a buffalo kill, two crocodiles were pulling flesh from a dismembered part of the carcass as well. The kill was across the dry riverbed but still the smell of blood and meat reached us. While all this life and death were happening there was a small, still pool with a Hamerkop in it, tranquilly going on with its life. On leaving Shingwedzi near the dry riverbed on the S52 we saw another two lion but could not take photos as the lions were in dense bush.

While sitting at the river watching elephants drinking from holes they had dug, a small herd of other elephants appeared from the bush and quietly appeared from dense bush and walked without a sound down to the river.

Other animals spotted were impala, kudu, buffalo, giraffe, zebra, elephant, baboons, ground and tree squirrels, blue wildebeest, crocodile, hippos, warthog, and many species of birds including a martial eagle. 

23/24 August - Tsenze Rustic Camp Site

The amount of wind at Tsenze made me think of home (home is Cape Town); when camp is set the only thing to make me feel more comfortable is a hot cup of tea. I had wonderful hours spent reading my book on museums, lazing around and watching the gorgeous, cheeky  red and yellow billed hornbills in camp. Being out of reach of digital connectivity was really relaxing - days felt less structured, just rising in the morning, making sandwiches for our morning drive and then going out in the late afternoon before the camp gates closed at 18h00.

I came into Kruger needing to disassociate with real life as work brings out necessary but unappealing behaviours like checking for new work in inboxes every few minutes or processing large amounts of work in as little time as possible. I find serenity in many ways at Kruger - the infinite nuances of browns - in the bush, in the feathers of the francolins and fur of the ground squirrels is amazing in its variety, and staring off into the close, dense bush and looking forward to journaling about all we have seen. Journaling helps cement all these moments into my mind, my mind which already knows we are counting down the days until our eventual return to real life. But until then I am free, in wistful thoughts, in a trance-like state at times when staring at the bush too long, all thoughts suspended.

Time does pass - there was the beginning of a spider web on the camper trailer, and on my sun hat which had rested on the outside trailer for maybe an hour!

The area around Tsenze is dry and stark, driving through the elephant-damaged stunted mopane growth lulls your mind into a dream-like state. Your only responsibility is to try and spot animals the same colours as the wooded savannah landscape.

The warthogs we encounter are either busily walking off or kneeling, with their flattened faces and tusks dusty from digging. The colours of the sand and dust is grey, red and black. I am taken with reflecting the on the broad foreheads of buffalo and wrinkles on elephants

We heard an African Fish Eagle's distinctive call which is the sound I will always associate with visits to Kruger. There were different bird sounds in the camp - the clacking of the hornbills beaks, the francolins cry which could wake up the dead, the smaller birds filling in the spaces between, the far lull of other campers' voices and zebras in the far distance. The hornbills beaks are beautiful flashes of colour in this bleached landscape, their little legs walking self-importantly over to the next hornbill to peck it back into order.

The two days at Tsenze are ironically overcast, just when we needed the sun which had been beating down on us until that time. The rest camp has no electricity and our power was from solar panels which were quite useless under the circumstances. Still, the camp had a freezer we made use of and otherwise the energy charge was managed by visiting the Mopani camp and finding a place to charge up the batteries.

Animals spotted were: lion, impala, zebra, blue wildebeest, many elephants, 3 ostrich, tsessebe, waterbuck, kudu, crocodiles, hippos, steenbok, buffalo and 30 species of birds.

25/26 August - Letaba Rest Camp

Drinking morning tea while listening to unknown bird calls begins another day where real life is far away. Where the morning unravels at the same slow pace as an elephant's walk.

My thoughts returned to the Shingwedzi elephants and how they had walked, noticing how they walk in a line, all the adults following one after the other, just not the juveniles who wandered around the same path. At the Letaba Elephant Education Centre there was a poster describing the elephants walk in line to lower the amount of energy required to move over such long processions that they cover to feed and find water.

At the centre was also a real foot of an elephant to show how they actually walk on their tip toes, the large pads absorb all the sound; the pads in front are round and the back feet are oval in shape.

The sight I remember most from Letaba was the ground squirrels, so many of them, literally defining the word "gamboling" (to frolic, skip, hop). They seemed to roam singularly but did get together to chase each other, fight with each other and one approached a dwarf mongoose to give it a sniff.

There are so many bird types, but here the familiar becomes more exotic - pigeons and doves at home are speckled, laughing or red eyed are recognizable but here are known as Namaqua, Africa Mourning or Emerald-Spotted Wood, African Green or Tambourine. Red wing starlings at home have much more colourful cousins at Kruger - the Cape Glossy or Meve's which have the most gorgeous iridescent blue plumage imaginable in the dusty bush that they appear out of. At home we have Cape Francolins, here we spotted Swainson's and Natal Spurfowl.

The sound I most associate with Letaba happened after dark. We had camped alongside the periphery of the camp fence and out of nowhere a hyena burst out of the dark and disappeared as fast when a torch light found the glint of his eyes in the bush. The heavy beat of its running paws stood out for me as they came closer on the pathway, worn flat and open on the outside of the camp.

Animals spotted: elephant, giraffe, ground squirrel, waterbuck, honey badger, warthogs, buffalo, dwarf mongoose, leopard, a cheetah kill with an impala, kudu, zebra, blue wildebeest, 2 ostriches in a mating dance, tree leguaan, banded mongoose, vervet monkeys, waterbuck, tree squirrels, 2 rhino wet from the riverbed and around 50 species of birds.

27/28 August - Satara Rest Camp

The environment is Olifants rugged veld, mixed thornveld and woodlands.

Trees spotted in the camp: White Stinkwood, Lowveld Cluster-Leaf, Cape Ash, Natal Mahogany, Sausage Tree (without sausages), Wild-Mango, Weeping Boer-Bean, Long-Tail Cassia, Baobab, Umbrella Thorn, Maroela, Common Cluster Fig, Sjambok Pod, Knob Thorn, Apple-Leaf, White Seringa, Fever Thorn, Brown Ivory, Lala Palm, Red Bushwillow, Zebrawood and Lala Palm.

I did wonder why the Lala Palm was so prolific but some reading showed that it bears fruit which are enjoyed by elephant, baboons and vervet monkeys who distribute the seeds.

The call in Satara I remember most it the rolling chirrup of the African Mourning Dove. It did seem a long way to drive to see house sparrows and Egyptian geese which we have at home.

Animals spotted: buffalo, giraffe, impala, baboon, blue wildebeest, zebra, kudu, elephant, giraffe, warthog, hippo, crocodile, leopard, 2 lions, waterbuck, vervet monkeys, snake and around 40 species of birds.

29 August - Travelling to the Sabie Area

We travelled to the Skukuza Rest Camp to play tourists in the very busy, consumer-oriented area with very little animal sightings and where the temperature reached 39.5 degrees Celsius. Finally we left the Kruger lowveld via the Phabeni Gate, travelled along the R536 to the Sabie escarpment through Hazyview (which was incredibly hazy), through Graskop to the Merry Pebbles Resort in Sabie. After the heat, the green, lush nature of Sabie (with a reduced temperature of about 28 degrees Celsius) was a welcome visual break. The road was flanked by pine plantations, so dense the ferns in the undergrowth struggled to flourish; but outside of the forests the ferns were unstoppable, pushing up out of the burnt scrub next to the road.

We visited the following falls: Sabie Falls, Lone Creek Falls, Horseshoe Falls, Bridal Veil Falls, Mac Mac Falls, Forest Falls.

We left in drizzle, cool air and a completely different weather patten from Skukuza. The dense tree plantations are planted in efficient, rigid spacing making any naturally occurring trees seem out of place with trunks that are twisted, curved and bent unlike the plantations of straight trees, planted for their uniformity to form a wall along the roads.

30 August - Over the Free State into the Northern Cape

Travelling over the Klein Vet River, I wished I had kept a list of all the river names we passed.

I was amazed not only how many ecozones we drove through but also how many provincial borders we crossed: Western Cape, Northern Cape, Free State, Gauteng, Mpumalanga, Limpopo and North West.

31 August - Karoo National Park and Homeward Bound

As the rock-filled dull green shrublands welcome us back, we know the end is in sight now. The kudu are darker in appearance than the ones we saw in Kruger, there are no brightly coloured birds, just ones in the same shades as the scrub.

Animals spotted: kudu, ostrich, eland, springbok and a black-backed jackal

I know I'm home when we drive through the Du Toits Kloof Pass - there is actual water running out of the mountain, in waterfalls and in much less impressive dribbles that flood over into the drains. The water seeps downwards, glistening in the sun, the kloofs are green, there are shadows from the mountains and rolling green. We can see Matroosberg which was under snow when we left and is still white. There are calla lilies and canola fields as the landscape reshuffles into the urban chaos we call home.

Bird Sightings in Kruger

x means we sighted more than 20

All sightings were listed on the eBird app

	Species	No. of Sightings
1	African Darter	2
2	African Fish Eagle	8
3	African Gray Hornbill	2
4	African Jacana	2
5	African Paradise-Flycatcher	1
6	African Pied Wagtail	1
7	African Scops-Owl	2
8	African Spoonbill	1
9	African Woolly-Necked Stork	1
10	Arrow-Marked Babbler	x
11	Bateleur	8
12	Bearded Scrub-Robin	2
13	Bearded Woodpecker	3
14	Black Crake	1
15	Black Kite	1
16	Black-Backed Puffback	5
17	Black-Collared Barbet	1
18	Blacksmith Lapwing	x
19	Brown Snake-Eagle	1
20	Brown-headed Parrot	5
21	Brown-Hooded Kingfisher	1
22	Burchell's Starling	5
23	Cape Griffon	4
24	Cape Starling	x
25	Chinspot Batis	1
26	Collared Sunbird	4
27	Common Bulbul	3
28	Common Bulbul (Dark-capped)	6
29	Common Ostrich	2
30	Crested Barbet	9
31	Crested Francolin	18
32	Crowned Lapwing	2
33	Egyptian goose	x
34	Emerald-spotted Wood-Dove	7
35	Fork-tailed Drongo	x
36	Golden-breasted Bunting	5
37	Gray Go-away-bird	9
38	Gray Heron	2
39	Gray-headed Bushshrike	2
40	Great Egret	6
41	Greater Blue-Eared Starling	x
42	Green Woodhoopoe	17
43	Green-Backed Camaroptera	2
44	Hadada Ibis	2
45	Hamerkop	2
46	Helmeted Guineafowl	x
47	Hooded Vulture	2
48	House Sparrow	4
49	Kori Bustard	2
50	Lappet-Faced Vulture	4
51	Laughing Dove	x
52	Lilac-Breasted Roller	x
53	Little Swift	x
54	Magpie Shrike	x
55	Marabou Stork	7
56	Marico Sunbird	1
57	Martial Eagle	3
58	Meve's Starling	6
59	Mocking Cliff-Chat	2
60	Mosque Swallow	2
61	Mourning Collared-Dove	7
62	Namaqua Dove	15
63	Natal Spurfowl	x
64	Olive Thrush	1
65	Red-billed Buffalo-Weaver	7
66	Red-Billed Firefinch	19
67	Red-billed Oxpecker	2
68	Red-Capped Robin-Chat	3
69	Red-Crested Bustard	1
70	Red-Winged Starling	9
71	Ring-necked Dove	16
72	Saddle-Billed Stork	2
73	Southern Cordonbleu	x
74	Southern Gray-Headed Sparrow	10
75	Southern Red-Billed Hornbill	x
76	Southern Yellow-Billed Hornbill	x
77	Speckled Mousebird	17
78	Spur-Winged Goose	3
79	Square-Tailed Drongo	6
80	Striped Kingfisher	2
81	Sulphur-Breasted Bushshrike	1
82	Swainson's Spurfowl	9
83	Tawny-flanked Prinia	1
84	Three Banded Plotver	1
85	Water Thick-Knee	8
86	White Helmetshrike	12
87	White-backed Vulture	2
88	White-Breasted Sunbird	3
89	White-Browed Robin-Chat	1
90	White-Crowned Lapwing	5
91	White-Crowned Shrike	2
92	White-Faced Whistling Duck	8
93	White-Fronted Bee-Eater	7
94	Yellow-Billed Oxpecker	4
95	Yellow-Billed Stork	6
96	Yellow-Fronted Canary	8